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First U.S.-Canada research forum held
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The United States and Canada Northern Oil and Gas Research Forum in Anchorage in late October was the first in what organizers hope will be a continuing series.
“The idea for the conference came, in time-honored fashion, from discussions over beer and wine after a long day of Arctic Council meetings,” Drue Pearce, federal coordinator, Office of the Federal Coordinator for Natural Gas Transportation Projects, said the first morning of the three-day meeting.
Pearce said a discussion of ice scouring research in the Canadian Beaufort led to a discussion about research efforts on both sides of the border and the question of whether there was effective communication across the border.
“Not a year later, here we are at what I hope will be the first of many forums,” Pearce said, calling the forum “a great opportunity for the United States and Canada, countries which share not only a border but also a commitment to responsible development of our resources, to bring together scientists, resource managers and industry to discuss what research is being conducted and how it can actually be used.”
She called on participants to not “simply catalogue what we are doing,” but to “build a cooperative effort in which the research that’s being done is the research that policy makers need to make the decisions of the day.”
Held jointly with ITM John Goll, Alaska regional director for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, said MMS was planning its biannual information transfer meeting as plans for the forum were taking shape, “so what we did is really meld the two together.”
There were separate information transfer meetings in an adjoining room, but “a number of our Beaufort Sea researchers will be making their presentations here within the forum,” he said, including Canadian national researchers funded by MMS.
John Payne, executive director of the North Slope Science Initiative, discussed the need to bring data together across the border, both the common border between Alaska and Canada and across the circumpolar Arctic.
When NSSI looked at the kind of research that was being done in Alaska’s Arctic in 2007, for example, it found 565 individual projects, but there was enough duplication so the final count came in at some 400 projects either ongoing or just recently completed, Payne said.
NSSI includes federal, state and local agencies — with information needs ranging from site specific to almost global, he said, and they are “trying to identify what the priority needs are” and then flesh out the issues under the broad categories that have been identified.
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